3 Ways to Use Personalised Email Marketing to Increase Sales

3 Ways to Use Personalised Email Marketing to Increase Sales

In this article you’ll see some examples of how you can use personalised email marketing for your customers. By the end you’ll understand that personalisation is one of the keys to success in email marketing.

Before you can really personalise your email you need to segment your prospects into meaningful categories.

Think of your customers as Lego People. You can categories them as a single type of character or you can mix and match features of the different figures. They all become unique!

If you are engaging your prospects they will stay engaged and enjoy your emails, not skip them.

Here's Why You Should Personalise Emails:

• Personalised emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, but 70% of brands fail to use them.
• Marketers who are personalising their web experiences and who are able to quantify the improvement see, on average, a 19% uplift in sales.
• For 66% of marketers, one of the big struggles with personalisation is securing internal resources to execute personalised marketing programs.

Let’s get into the examples.

Below you’ll find 3 examples of how you can personalise your emails for your prospects or customers. The first two examples will be a prospect:

Personalisation for Prospects:

Giving the prospect what they want, when they want it:

Many businesses believe that as long as they send customers and prospects emails with their names in the email or subjects that it’s enough. Marketers often forget that recipients may be receiving 50-100 emails a day depending on whether the email captured is a personal or business email address. A great way to personalize your emails from day 1 is to ask the prospect a very direct question about how often they would like to receive emails, then deliver.

The idea is not to let the prospect or customer dictate exactly what they get and when they get it, rather it’s to make the individual make a decision regarding the amount of content by giving them a few options for content frequency. If you are listening to the individual they will appreciate this and are more likely to actually read the emails you send to them.

Down the road, if the individual is opening every email you have sent them and has bought a product, you may ask them again if they’d like to change the frequency of their emails…pushing for more frequent content! The next step could be customising emails and landing pages. If you're a research buff you can see the Marketing Sherpa research on How Often Customers Want To Receive Promotional Emails.

Personalising landing pages from emails:

This personalisation is another great one for prospects whom have just signed up. It will work well once an individual has downloaded a lead magnet or subscribed to a newsletter.

If you're a winery for example: In your thank you or welcome email you can have content specific to the lead magnet or general content that educates the customer on your different wine varieties. Make sure you have images and links so the customer is engaged and is more likely to click on one of the links. Links and images can have a range of options: varieties of wine, price points, discounts, special offers. Two points: 1. The email should not be overwhelming, so choose your content based on your goal 2. The more specific you are, the better.

If a prospect clicks on one of the images or links the page that they land on should echo the content they clicked in the email. A great welcome page could have the vintage of their choice on the page. If the prospect sees a custom page just for them they are more likely to stick around and maybe even buy.

Tip: If you’ve served the customer a few personalised emails, they haven’t bought or are consistently skipping your emails, you may want to start looking at what time they did open emails in the past and send emails around that time. A time and location personalisation is a bit more advanced, however can pay dividends.

Personalisation for Customers:

As marketers we love nothing more than being able to speak to a customer so personally that they keep coming back. Not only does it increase the CLTV, but it also means that we are doing a damn good job!

Personalised Recommendations and Discounts:

When prospect becomes a customer, your work is not done. In fact, it’s just beginning! You have moved from nurture to retention mode. This is fun because now you know what the customer wants. One of the best types of emails you can give to your customers is a recommendation email.

Scenario: A customer has bought the same Shiraz for the last 12 months. You have just released a new vintage which has a similar profile and is about $10 more expensive per bottle. The individual has come to your site and abandoned their cart, which isn’t unusual. They generally fill their cart a couple of days before checking out.

A great way to get this person on to the new wine would be to send them an abandoned cart email with a recommendation the day after their visit. The offer could be $10 off the other bottle to get them to add that bottle to their cart. If you’re feeling very generous you could even give them the bottle as a thank you for being a loyal customer.

The other one we really love is a birthday gift discount or free birthday bottle. There is a lot of contention as to whether giving free gifts will actually benefit you in the long run. It varies for everyone…you’ll never know if you don’t try.

Remember, personalisation is going to increase sales and turn customers into evangelists. If you are having trouble getting the internal resources to make this kind of thing happen you can always get help turning customers into evangelists.